Users of mass transmit vehicles, such as trains, buses, or planes, often rely on route maps and vehicle schedules to properly identify a desirable vehicle, stop location, and time of departure from that stop location. If the route map or vehicle schedules are erroneous, out-of-date, or temporarily adjusted (e.g., due to extreme weather conditions, broken tracks, road construction, or the like), the passengers are often left waiting for excessive amounts of time at the stop location or, in some cases, may never find the appropriate vehicle for their purposes.
A number of factors can affect the design of a system that generates vehicle information and provides access to route map information, vehicle schedule information, and the like. Information reliability is one such factor. If a vehicle information system is unreliable, passengers may dismiss any information provided by the system as being untrustworthy and may become frustrated with the overall mass transit system. For example, in some developing nations, train schedules are published for the benefit of train passengers, but the schedules are frequently erroneous—sometimes causing passengers to wait for hours after the published arrival time. Moreover, in some developing nations, the train schedules are not even published, thereby leaving passengers with past experience and word-of-mouth to determine the appropriate arrival and departure time of the trains.
Another factor that can affect the design of a vehicle information system is the real-time or contemporaneous accuracy on a given day. For example, some vehicle systems, such as trains, may use a monitoring device—designed to periodically track and report the location of the train—that is registered to a particular train and is physically attached to the train's conductor car. In certain circumstances, the train-registered monitoring device can provide updated estimates of the particular train's location on a given day based upon a predetermined route map. Such train-registered monitors, however, are generally complex and require a significant investment from the train companies. Many mass transit vehicle systems—especially those in developing nations—generally do not undergo the significant investment to equip each train with a monitoring device registered thereto, thus leaving the passengers being subject to having no schedule at all or having a published schedule that could be erroneous, out-of-date, or temporarily inaccurate.